A post about limitations on access to public domain materials
A recent blog post discusses the interaction between the public domain materials and contracts signed by libraries (either as the contract providers or as license holders).
Think about how this bizarre situation has turned public domain on its head – a government employee has created public domain documents, a company has acquired them, and the public now needs to go through that company to see those documents. And if you are a subscriber who has paid for access and then you attempt to download all of those public domain documents to make them publicly available – look out! If you do this, you’ve likely violated your contract / license with the company to access those public domain documents, even though those public domain documents have no copyright protection. The commercial vendor considers the license to trump public domain status.
The post talks mostly about the Government Accountability Office’s legislative histories and Google Books, but the issues discussed apply not only to government publications, but to all public domain documents (such as all materials published in the United States pre-1923).
I understand the practical difficulty for librarians in coping with the daily interaction between copyright and licensing. Especially when there is no actual copyright! But the difficulties in thinking about this situation won’t stop libraries from continuing to serve patrons by purchasing access to databases that mostly or entirely contain public domain materials.
Advocacy, Digital Rights Management, Fair use, Open Access, Public domain
This posts brings to mind discussions about licensing of other public domain material in databases, such as uncopyrightable facts and figures, collected with quite a bit of cost and effort, but assembled without the requisite creativity.
Working at a state government library, we pay a lot of money for improved access to otherwise public domain materials. It doesn’t bother me to essentially pay for time and effort that, although I do wish it were less expensive. What does bother me, though, is when public domain materials are ONLY available through for-pay resources.
For more on this topic, including results of a FOIA request to confirm the situation, see Free Government Information‘s post, “GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West” at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1798.